Deaths leave unfillable holes in the lives of loved ones

Marty Klinkenberg, edmontonjournal.com05.25.2012

Bradon Pike is shown with his parents, Jim and Margaret, in Fort McMurray celebrating his 21st birthday. He died less than a year later in a head-on collision on Highway 63 north of Wandering River.
/ Submitted Photo

Annie Lelievre of Fort McMurray lost her 22-year-old son, Jason, in an accident on New Year's Eve. Here, she is at home holding his graduation picture.Marty Klinkenberg
/ edmontonjournal.com

This is a roadside memorial near Abee, with a semi headed south on Highway 63 in background on May 10, 2012.
/ Dan Barnes

This is the site where seven people were killed in a head-on crash along Highway 63 about 50 km north of Wandering River on April 27.

There are three memorials from two accidents set up at this location on highway 63.

This is the crash site where seven people were killed in a head-on crash along highway 63 about 50 km north of Wandering River.Ed Kaiser

Annie Lelievre of Fort McMurray with her son, "My Little Man," Jason Lebedynski, who died in a crash on Highway 63 on New Year's Eve while en route to Edmonton to meet his girlfriend.
/ Submitted Photo

Bradon Pike, who died in 2010 on Highway 63 in a head-on collision, is shown at an air cadet glider camp in Manitoba in 2006. The aspiring pilot has a bursary in his name at Mount Royal University.
/ Submitted Photo

A memorial for Jason Lebedynski, who died on New Year's Eve near Mariana Lake, rests 10 feet from two crosses for other victims who died in nearly the same location Highway 63.Marty Klinkenberg

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FORT MCMURRAY – In almost every corner of Annie Lelievre’s house, there is a memory of Jason: his high school graduation picture; a snapshot of him and his baby sister, Jessica, playing in the tub; his baptismal certificate; the award he won in a young authors’ contest; the box full of ashes which sits atop the dresser in his grieving mother’s bedroom.

A handsome string bean, Jason Lebedynski was six-foot-six and played football at Father Patrick Mercredi High School in Fort McMurray. A good student, he flourished in French immersion and was about to enter the environmental studies program at NAIT when he died at in a four-vehicle smash-up on Highway 63 on New Year’s Eve. He was 22.

“You can’t imagine the pain I go through every day,” Lelievre says, seated in her dining room in Fort McMurray, eyes red, cheeks streaked and face anguished. “People tell me it will get easier, but it hasn’t.

“When my son died, I lost my heart and soul.”

On his way to Edmonton to meet his girlfriend and to ring in 2012, Jason called his mom.

They had always been close, especially after her marriage ended. He was a preteen then, but already towered over his mother, who took to calling him “MLM” — short for My Little Man.

“When they told me my son died, a part of me died with him,” says Lelievre, who became a scaffolder after her divorce because she needed more earnings to support her children. “I just froze. You don’t think about anything and then, it’s, ‘No, you are lying to me.’ I was just talking to him on the phone.”

Originally from the Gaspé Peninsula in Quebec, Lelievre moved 30 years ago to northern Alberta where she met her ex-husband, John. Jason, who worked at the local ski hill and was a keen snowboarder, was their first-born.

Beside the highway north of Mariana Lake, there’s a memorial to him, a black cross that John, an ironworker, forged in his memory. It sits in a cluster with crosses that mark the location where a young mother and her sunny six-year-old daughter died in a crash in December 2010.

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Like teardrops, dozens of monuments dot the sides of Highway 63, the calamitous corridor that connects points south to the vast riches of the oilsands. A two-lane road that stretches 443 kilometres from the outskirts of Edmonton, the highway bears the scars of scores of victims: 50 people have been killed in head-on collisions in the last six years, overall at least 149 have died since 1990.

“It has been two years and it still feels like yesterday,” Margaret Pike says in the home she and husband Jim share in Fort McMurray.

His dad’s best friend and hunting buddy, Bradon Pike died a week short of his 22nd birthday in April 2010 when a vehicle with bald tires driven by an unlicensed driver crossed the highway in a snowstorm and hit him head-on.

“It is still hard,” Jim, a cabinetmaker, says, choking back tears.

From the time he was five years old, Bradon wanted to be a pilot. At 12, he joined the air cadets, at 17 he attended glider camp, for his 18th birthday his parents purchased him an introductory flight, and at 20 he began flying aerial tours for McMurray Aviation.

PAGEBREAKNow, beside Highway 63, there is a monument placed by friends, a plaque and a cross at the top of which sits a metal airplane inscribed with the words, “The Heart and Essence of Bradon Pike.”

“Even though your heart is broken and can never be repaired, you still have to go through everyday life,” Margaret says. “But we miss him. He was our baby.”

The Pikes came to Fort McMurray from Newfoundland in 1979, and lived for their only child.

Bradon’s flying certificate hangs on the wall above the stairway, dried flowers from his funeral are propped in a vase in one corner, and a taxidermied impala, warthog and wildebeest he bagged during a bowhunting safari with his dad are displayed in the basement.

There are albums brimming with pictures, too: Bradon kissing a cod at a screeching-in party in Newfoundland; cliff diving in Mexico; snowboarding in Banff; swimming with dolphins and stingrays in the Dominican Republic; standing beside the plane he piloted for his mom and his dad.

The day he died, Bradon drove to Edmonton for his annual aviation physical and had dinner in the food court at the Kingsway Mall, where his mother and father were shopping. Worried about his long drive, they asked him to stay the night, but he wanted to get home and work on his car, an imported Nissan Skylark that is still parked in the driveway.

“The only thing he wanted for Christmas that year was car parts,” Jim says.

Around 9:30, Bradon phoned from Wandering River, a community 200 km south of Fort McMurray, and told his mother it was snowing, but the road was clear.

It was the last time they spoke.

“He said it wasn’t bad,” Margaret says. “He didn’t want me to worry.”

About an hour later, after being hit head-on, Bradon was pinned in the wreckage of his Hyundai Elantra on slushy asphalt 30 km south of Mariana Lake.

A family friend who loved Bradon like an adopted son, Tim Rebkowich was dispatched from the fire station in Wandering River. Meeting an RCMP officer at the scene, Rebkowich told him grimly, “I know this guy.”

“All you can do in a situation like that is do the best you can,” says Rebkowich, who stepped down as fire chief shortly after the call.

The next morning, on their way back to Fort McMurray, the Pikes stopped briefly beside the road where their son died.

“We found his hat,” Jim says.

Married 23 years, they are still grieving but carrying on as best they can.

Taking out her cellphone, his mother rereads one of her son’s last text messages.

Sitting at his laptop, his father visits Bradon’s Facebook page. Two nights before he died, his son posted the following message: “Bradon is the most happy he has been in forever.”

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Although the information is hard to obtain from government, an analysis by the Edmonton Journal shows that a great percentage of accidents on Highway 63 since 1990 occurred in winter and late fall, and that most fatalities were the result of head-on crashes.

Victims ranged from 11 months to 81, with an average age in the mid- to late 30s. Five fatalities occurred as a result of collisions with moose, one person died after being hit by debris and six people were run over, including a highway worker struck by a truck whose driver was distracted by the ringing of his cellphone.

PAGEBREAKOn Feb. 24, 1995, Roger Wicker was driving on Highway 63 from Edmonton to Plamondon, where his wife’s parents lived, when his van was hit head-on by a station wagon while rounding a curve west of Boyle.

Wicker’s four-year-old son, Derek, was thrown from the van and killed, one of his eight-year-old twin daughters suffered a perforated bowel, and all three of his other children sustained minor injuries, including one tossed clear of the accident scene.

Wicker, now 46 and a real-estate appraiser in Lloydminster, suffered a broken arm, dislocated right foot and head trauma, and required $15,000 worth of dental work.

“It was a few years getting my memory back,” he says. “Honestly, physically you recover. Mentally, it’s just time.

“When we look back at it, it was hard to get over. I think some of the children still have psychological issues that nobody thought to address at the time. There is definitely more of a family psychological impact than physical.”

Wicker has only vague memories of the crash, which killed the other driver, a 74-year-old from Stony Plain who may have been having a heart attack when he crossed the centre line. It was snowing, but road conditions were not unusually poor.

“Actually, I was fortunate,” Wicker says. “We went back and looked at the vehicle, and it was hit on my side. I’m not even sure why I have a pair of legs. There was only maybe two or three inches in between the floorboard and the dash.”

Wicker has returned to that same stretch of Highway 63 only a few times in the 17 years since then. He avoids it intentionally.

“There are lots of other ways to get to Edmonton from Plamondon, other than taking that highway,” he says. “It’s no fun going around that curve.”

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Although they are officially discouraged by Alberta Transportation officials as a potential distraction to drivers, memorials are scattered along Highway 63 from its starting point at the intersection of Route 28 near Radway to its conclusion north of Fort MacKay.

Some markers are simple, others elaborate. Each mourns a life suddenly lost.

There is a father returning to Fort McMurray after witnessing his daughter’s birth in Edmonton, a firefighter and union workers whose blue hard hats now hang from posts. There is a children’s pastor and his wife and two-year-old son, and a woman pregnant with her first child, all killed on April 27 north of Wandering River. There are bright young men like Bradon Pike and Jason Lebedynski, and amazing women like the irrepressible Tanya Elaine Zwaan.

A triathlete with a passion for shoes and chocolate, Zwaan was planning to move in with her fiancée when the Honda Fit she was driving spun into the path of an oncoming SUV the afternoon of Dec. 13, 2010. She died alongside her six-year-old daughter, Ione, who loved dangly necklaces, Justin Bieber and taekwondo.

PAGEBREAK“She was a girlie girl,” her grandmother, Wanda Zwaan of Fort Saskatchewan, says of Ione. “She would brush your hair for hours.”

Born in Edmonton, Tanya uttered her first words at four months, had a six-year-old’s vocabulary at a year and a half and could count to 20 in English and French before she was three.

A cheerleader, she graduated from Ardrossan High School half a year early and entered the culinary arts program at NAIT, after which she hired on as a chef at the Crowne Plaza for three years. She was 30 when she died, and for eight years had worked for ATCO, most recently as the senior land administrator.

“She was absolutely amazing,” Wanda Zwaan says. “That is the only way to describe her.”

Wanda Zwaan designed the memorials for her oldest daughter and granddaughter that sit beside the road a few feet from where Jason Lebedynski died a little more than a year later near Mariana Lake.

Tanya’s bicycling shoes hang from her cross and a tube of her lip gloss and mascara are strung in her wreath. Ione’s taekwondo shirt and the last belt she earned hang from her cross, above a wreath that includes a Tinker Bell purse and a bottle of blueberry Barbie body glitter.

At their funeral, guests wore shoes they knew Tanya would have liked — everything from sneakers to disco boots — and sang Baby Baby by Justin Bieber, as well as Amazing Grace.

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In the aftermath of her son’s death, Annie Lelievre began collecting signatures for a petition that demands the government move faster to widen Highway 63 and add another lane in each direction.

On April 27, the Friday that seven people died in a head-on crash, she had 600 names. Today, as anger percolates over the provincial government’s perceived foot-dragging, she has more than 6,500.

“I would like to see the highway twinned to save somebody from the same tragedy I have experience,’’ says Lelievre, who has known three other people who died on the roadway.

“I don’t want anyone else to have to live the way I do. Some mornings, it is hard to even get dressed. I am just trying to get by day by day.”

After Jason died, she took a month off work. Since then, she has been working on his behalf.

“I felt I had to speak up for him to make sure his voice would be heard,” Lelievre says.

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